Programme
Please see the current version of the programme below; click titles to see abstracts and keywords.
Additional programme information:
- For a downloadable version, including abstracts, please use this .pdf format file
- To see the working papers and slides that presenters have provided, please visit this dropbox folder. (If you’d like to add a paper, please email it to afpp@manchester.ac.uk.
Note: all times are in British Summer Time (= GMT/UTC+1).
Jump to: Monday PM, Tuesday AM, Tuesday PM, Wednesday AM.
Monday 12th June, 2023
Keywords: Socialism, Democracy, Europe, Republicanism, Property, Memory.
In recent years, feminist social theory has made a major contribution to thinking more specifically about the temporality of protests. However, this contribution has rarely been acknowledged so far. My proposed contribution to the conference, which is a part of my PhD-project, would try to fill this gap.
First, I argue that liberal democracies are based on a continuous, linear temporality, which, however, does not exclude ruptures. In a second step, I reconstruct three different concepts of temporality of protests from feminist theory. The first position, represented by Judith Butler and Jodi Dean, understands protests as a rupture, which, however, does not question the linear temporality of liberal democracy. The second position declares that protests establish a new form of temporality that can be grasped in terms of Walter Benjamin’s Jetztzeit, as Isabell Lorey and Verónica Gago have argued. The third position represented by Eva von Redecker, describes protests as a struggle against the loss of time in the neoliberal era. All three approaches will be illustrated by empirical examples of protest from recent years.
In a final step, I will argue that the three theoretical approaches should not be combined into one position. Instead, protests can take any of these forms of temporality. The temporal structure of the protests determines whether they take on a liberal-conservative, progressive, or regressive character.
This paper– drawing on a decade of historical and interview research– addresses why and how people spontaneously join revolutions and uprisings. While many aspects of these phenomena require tremendous resources and organizing, instances of spontaneity often involve people with no connection to organized movements taking to the streets, largely of their own accord. Looking to the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, and the Black Lives Uprising, as well as the 1789 French Revolution, I develop a new theory that bridges large scale structural shifts with actors’ aggregated individual and group-based predispositions to explain this spontaneous element: affinity-convergence theory.
This paper argues that the interface between autonomous forms of mobilisation, through which migrants weave new social relations, and visible collective action such as protests, enabling migrants to make demands to the state, has been overlooked in the scholarships of migrant resistance, critical citizenship, and critical migration.
By focusing on the grassroots mobilisation against border regimes in Berlin, I contend that migrant and pro-migrant protests are closely connected with an increased awareness of the mechanisms of oppression embedded in border regimes and the establishment of new social relations that take shape in autonomous forms of mobilisation.
Analysing the interface between these different layers or poles of mobilisation is crucial to overcome the dichotomic understanding of migrant activism as either autonomous from the state, associated with radical politics challenging borders and the state as an institution, or state-oriented, and thus essentially reformist.
I argue that this analysis enables us to bring together theoretical perspectives that explain different, albeit interconnected aspects of migrant organizing; these include the literature on the autonomy of migration, acts of citizenship, and social movements
Over the past few years, environmental protests in Northern Europe have been increasingly tied to struggles around the high cost of living. In France, this was exemplified by the slogan “end of the world, end of the month, same fight” (Gaborit and Gremion 2019) aiming to bridge ecological concerns with the claims for fairer energy prices made by the yellow vests. In the UK, political movements against the rise of energy bills have recently brought together climate activists, trade unionists and organisations fighting fuel poverty. …
Environmental politics and the cost of living crisis: politicising the ordinary?
Supported by the Sustainable Consumption Institute
Over the past few years, environmental protests in Northern Europe have been increasingly tied to struggles around the high cost of living. In France, this was exemplified by the slogan “end of the world, end of the month, same fight” (Gaborit and Gremion 2019) aiming to bridge ecological concerns with the claims for fairer energy prices made by the yellow vests. In the UK, political movements against the rise of energy bills have recently brought together climate activists, trade unionists and organisations fighting fuel poverty. This shift in the framing of environmental issues puts the ordinary back at the centre of collective action, by politicising everyday consumption, debt and domestic life. These inequalities also exist transnationally: lifestyles in the global North have been described as an ‘imperial mode of living’ (Brand and Wissen 2021) that continues to perpetuate geopolitical relationships of economic and cultural domination, and the rise of particular classed forms of environmentalism appear to be transnational, leading to new, intensified and intersectional forms of distinction and exclusion (Anantharaman 2018).
This panel intends to reflect on the politicisation of everyday life at the crossroad of environmental concerns and social concerns. How is the cost of living crisis reaffirming that ‘the personal is political’? Can we identify emerging forms of ‘working class environmentalism’ (Barca and Leonardi 2018) rooted in the domestic sphere? What tensions exist between everyday social reproduction and environmental politics? How ‘latent’ and how ‘visible’ are the politics of everyday life, and to what extent do social movements perpetuate the invisible labour of certain practices, forms of work and grievance? How effective are forms of political action that take place out of sight and off the streets? How do our imaginaries of everyday life and ordinary consumption shape political prospects for change?
Speakers
Dan Silver is a lecturer at the University of Manchester in the Department of Politics. Dan works using participatory methodologies with community organisations to collaborate and produce knowledge to inform practice and advance social justice. Prior to his PhD, Dan worked for many years in the voluntary sector organising networks to inform change to practice and policy.
Dan will be speaking about his collaborations with community organisations to recognise the radical potential of everyday politics, to develop new ways to effectively document social change, and through thinking about how to elevate the conceptual contribution of social action. Dan will explain his recent work with Rekindle School, an innovative new supplementary school in Manchester. Through recent collaboration with Rekindle, they have produced an action research framework that engages with histories of Black activism and situates the work of Rekindle in care, social justice, and hope.
Manisha Anantharaman is an Associate Professor of Justice Community and Leadership at Saint Mary’s College of California. She is a multi-disciplinary scholar who applies participatory and ethnographic methodologies to study how economic and political ideologies, socio-cultural identities, and power relations impact how “environmentalism” and “sustainability” are conceptualized and enacted at multiple scales. Her forthcoming book “Recycling Class” (MIT Press, 2023), examines environmental mobilizations around Bengaluru, India’s garbage crises as lens into the relational class, gender and caste politics of urban sustainability.
In this panel, I want to reflect on two distinct but related topics: First, what are the aesthetic politics of environmentalism and sustainability, and how does this contour who participates in “everyday environmentalism” and in what ways? Second, what does a focus on socio-material and metabolic relations reveal about the potential for and limitations of cross-class movements that effectively link environmental and social concerns? To illustrate these points, I will draw upon research and community engagement experiences in Indian cities, highlighting how class, race, and gender inequalities are intertwined with and restrict efforts to address environmental and social challenges. Additionally, I will delve into the concept of commoning and shared provisioning as forms of “everyday activism.” These practices can arise from economic constraints resulting from the rising cost of living and persistent poverty, as well as from ethical obligations and environmental concerns. I will discuss how commoning and shared provisioning have the potential to unite diverse environmental and social concerns and constituencies.
Kate Bradley works in housing law in her day job, and is a housing activist with Greater Manchester Tenants Union. She has recently organised with the group Don’t Pay, a grassroots campaign group opposing the rise in energy bills. She will be discussing campaigns against the cost of living and what they tell us about strategy and tactics in social movements, including the ways those groups have to reckon with the environmental crisis in their everyday organizing.
Tuesday 13th June, 2023
The paper first utilizes social movements theories to highlight how the same groups and organisations participating in social movements reappear in revolutionary processes. This side steps simplified classifications of different movements actors as “masses” or “political elites” and reaffirms that fact that most revolutions find their origins in movements for reform, not fundamental change.
The paper then argues that attempts to include the emergence of new revolutionary subjectivities within Tilly’s definition of a revolutionary situation points to the necessity for a new stage of revolution, a revolutionary window. This stage accounts for the ideologies of groups and organisations that contest current power holders without seeking to to replace them.
Finally, the paper improves on Tilly’s conception of a revolutionary situation by accounting for movements that seek autonomy as opposed to capturing state power. This escapes the need to classify participants as belonging to one of the two revolutionary or counter-revolutionary camps. Furthermore, it highlights the dynamism of revolutions and how, in the context of contemporary revolutions, revolutionary situations are often advanced by dominant groups such as the army or established political parties.
However, the Iranian revolutionary front is experiencing very deep crisis of organization which restricted it from becoming a significant political force. In this presentation, in addition to a brief description of political map of the opposition and their current coalitions, I would try to provide a critique of Iranian revolutionary front. From the point of organizational form, the long years of sectarian attitudes toward building organizations has made it impossible to build a strong coalition and long-term collaborative projects. From the point of political/social program, lack of concrete and inclusive sets of demands and agendas toward Democratic Socialism (which the common sense of Iranians is searching for) has isolated the discourse of Marxists, Socialists and, in general, the Left, from the political discourses that are dominant among active people in the uprising.
I hope that this presentation would bring about more discussion around the question of crisis of organization of revolutionary fronts on the international level, which Iran is simply part of it.
More recently, Fromm envisioned a “sane society,” Marcuse saw the “great refusals” of the 60s preludes for a postcapitalist “new sensibility.” For Habermas crises of legitimacy (economic, political, cultural) migrated from the system to the “life worlds” of identity, motivation, and emotion. Recent history has suggested a telos of progress, based in part and new expressions of collective identity , underpinned by underlying democratic versus authoritarian characteristics, that might be seen as the switchman on the tracks of history. Progressives seek identities based on freedom, self-fulfillment, solidarity, sharing, caring and harmony with Nature. But today, given the adversities of neoliberalism, precarity, inequality and in turn fear and anxiety, the more recent progressive movements, have challenged essentialist, hierarchical identities and in turn fostered widespread reactionary movements that would reverse social change what might be considered backlash. However, it should be noted, the reaction to the widespread authoritarian backlashes so evident today, prompt the younger generations, facing both economic distress as well as distaste and aversion to authoritarian values/identities progressive values are leading the way to mobilize for the various identities and values that stressed creativity over conformity, solidarity over atomism, self and collective fulfillment over authoritarianism, e.g. universal dignity.
Inside, the main focus in Ramaphosa’s speech is on what the government plans to do about 35% unemployment and the roughly ¼ of the population that had signed up for emergency stipends of just R350 a month (about £17). In 2021 there had been riots and fatal social unrest, with 345 people killed when this pittance of a grant was due to be cut. They were known as the ‘Zuma Riots’ (after the former president Jacob Zuma refused to testify in the Zondo Commission, and was imprisoned). Subsequently, Ramaphosa’s expert panel reported that civil unrest was not isolated to factions of Zuma supporters, but reflected the entrenched inequalities of decades of organised forgetting.
Developing Olùfémi O. Táíwò’s recent work on reparations (2021) and elite capture (2022), this paper considers resistant performances in the streets as evidence not of claims to reparations, but redress. Redress is what Táíwò describes as beyond ‘relationship repair’ (reconciliatory approach) (2021, 124), towards ‘worldmaking’ (constructive approach). By setting up alternative visions of what just society would look like, James manifests a model of justice – holding the state accountable for its failures, recruiting wider public as witnesses to harms of ‘state capture’ and organised forgetting that continues to fail the poorest in South Africa. Thus the paper addresses the limitations of post-apartheid narratives of repair, and the role of arts activism in resistance.
The play was then performed again, but audience members were asked to yell “stop” at any point when they wanted to interrupt the unfolding story. While audience members could tell the actors to say different words, they were urged to come on stage themselves to try out a different course of action. In each instance, the audience and actors discussed the plausibility, preferability, and viability of the recommended changes, which produced very fruitful disagreements about what could fairly be expected of students and the professors and staff hired to serve them. The Chief Diversity Officer of UCONN reflected, as the session closed, that he was considering including a theatrical workshop of this kind in the Fall 2022 new student orientation. Faculty present recommended that the same for orientating and training new and existing faculty.
Drawing as the workshop did on the Theatre of the Oppressed or Forum Theater techniques of the late Brazilian theater activist and popular educator Augusto Boal, it offered a brief, crystallized portrait of a familiar constellation of problems. Specifically, of how overwork in the neoliberal university is used as an excuse to rationalize educational practices that reenforce racist and xenophobic expectations about who rightfully belongs in spaces of higher education. However, in response, diversly implicated audience members could together practice enacting alternatives, concretely crafting new, anti-racist norms.
The chapter that follows draws on this case study and interviews with one of the HartBeat jokers, the workshop’s playwright, staff that chose to and ultimately invited the Ensemble, UCONN’s Chief Diversity Officer, and writing of and about Augusto Boal to explore how the theatrical space created room to practice specific instances and dimensions of transformation.
While focused on changing how belonging is understood and conveyed in the classroom, the implications reach beyond it to other interactions in which radical inequality can be uncritically reproduced or interrupted and remade. My claim is that, as with this UCONN Hartford instance, where theoretical conversations about antiracist education and activism were indispensably buttressed by practicing modes of engagement necessary to developing the social fabric of antiracist relations, that Theater of the Oppressed and Forum Theater also offer much to contemporary progressive political organizing as it deliberately responds to failures of more traditional conceptions of organization and leadership.
The relationship between populism, conspiracy theories and vaccine uncertainty have been already confirmed. It seems clear that there is a strong link between susceptibility to populism, conspiracy theories and vaccine aversion (Goldberg & Richey, 2020). Stecula and Pickup (2021) found a strong association between two types of populist attitudes, anti-vaccine and distrust of experts, and belief in conspiracy theories about the coronavirus in a sample from the United States. However, these factors are also part of a more general trend: anti-expert and distrust of state institutions is a general phenomenon that underpins populist discourse and plagues modern societies (Brubaker, 2021).
Our paper argues that anti-vaccination and anti-expert attitudes can be related to the general tendency of growing assertive attitudes, i.e. challenging elites and distrust vis-á-vis political institutions. Consequently assertive political culture promotes not exclusively pro-democratic, progressive social movements and political participation.
The paper’s arguments will be tested with a representative survey of 1000 respondents and the framing analysis of anti-vaccination movements in Hungary. The data was collected in November 2022.
In Japan, as LGBTQ pride parades (which are usually called Rainbow Pride/Parade) represent the most visible and powerful initiative movements for LGBTQ+ people, “diversity and inclusion” has often been a key concept. Pride Parades appears to be an effective space to agenda the intersection of queerness and disability.
This research used my fieldwork figures on rainbow pride/parades that took place in different places of Japan from 2022 to 2023, covering 17 locations. Drawing on interview data from organizers and disabled queer activists/participants, this paper will explore the inclusion and exclusion of people with disabilities in LGBT movements in Japan. It was found that LGBTQ people with disabilities face physical and emotional barriers to accessing the pride parade. Accessibility can be improved if there are any disabled queer participated it. However, organizers cannot complete it due to the economy and lack of volunteers. This clearly shows that it is essential to make effective use of welfare service and to create a space for dialogue between organizers and disabled participants.
We conducted nationally representative surveys before and after a week-long disruptive campaign by Just Stop Oil to block London’s M25 motorway. 1,415 members of the public were asked about their support for and identification with a moderate climate organisation (Friends of the Earth) and about their broader support for climate policies. The results show that people with higher overall awareness of Just Stop Oil tended to identify with and support Friends of the Earth more. Changes in people’s awareness of Just Stop Oil after vs. before the M25 protests predicted changes in their identification with and support for Friends of the Earth. That is, we find longitudinal evidence for a positive radical flank effect: the activities of a radical flank increase support for the more moderate faction of the movement. Regarding support for broader climate policies, the results pointed towards polarisation: Those least supportive of progressive climate policies and groups to begin with were negatively affected by Just Stop Oil’s protests, whereas those who were initially more favourable showed a slight positive effect or no change.
This article argues that often our approach to social movements is synchronic when it should be diachronic, and that we regularly study movements as if they are intervening in a structure that is not also in motion. When we do talk about change, we often talk about it in terms of a crisis or ruptural event, a moment when social norms are suspended and an abnormal fluidity replaces the social structure for a period of time (Bourdieu, 1984; Pagis, 2019).
Following EP Thompson, social movement theory needs ‘concepts appropriate to the investigation of process’ (Thompson, 1978, p.45). Concepts that can account for the dynamic nature of society and the shifting sands that the foundations of social phenomena are rooted in. Thompson himself uses an experiential approach explains social movements, social actors and society itself in a moving relationship that shapes the development of all three elements. (Thompson, 1963; Wood, 1995). This approach can be further enhanced by the inclusion of Paulo Freire’s theory of praxis, allowing an interpretation of activism as a pedagogical process (1970).
However, it is arguable that the static approach to the study of society emanates from the deep history of Western Philosophy, focussed as it is on substance at the expense of accident (Asouzu, 2011). Therefore, this article argues that in order to formulate processual approaches to the study of social movements, scholars should also look to African Philosophy for approaches with a more dynamic ontology that are more useful for studying processes such as Ubuntu (Ramose, 1995) and Ibuanyidanda (Asouzu, 2011).
The research is based on an engaged, embedded ethnographic approach that blends participant observation and in-depth interviews, rooted in a deep-seated participatory and feminist ethos. This body of work points to the complexities and the messy realities of worker cooperatives, highlighting as much the therapeutic practices they foster, the desire for emancipation they respond to and the anti-capitalist and anti-sectarian politics they are driven by. Both rage and hope cohabit in these alternative economic spaces where new practices are trialled. The paper explores worker cooperatives’ potential to create non-exploitative, ethical and therapeutic work practices, to reintegrate social justice and solidarity into economics and ultimately articulating a new ‘common sense’ for an economic reality beyond neoliberalism and sectarianism.
The assessment made of the worker cooperatives studied here may be a hopeful one. The fact remains that Northern Ireland provides a far from congenial environment for cooperative economies. Instead, the study employs a more compassionate gaze when investigating alternative economies, while also critically assesses the forceful limitations imposed upon them and the institutional attempts at co-option they confront, therefore contributing to academic debates on social and diverse economies.
This paper presents an overview of the key findings of three years of data collection and an ongoing conversation within the movement about how to be most effective at a time of continually emerging crises. The research highlights how prefigurative subcultures operate as both a strength and a weakness in the movement. One the one hand, drawing in young new entrant farmers and activist allies and creating a strong sense of collective identity, whilst on the other hand, alienating parts of the wider farming community and potentially limiting the uptake of agroecological practice. In this presentation, I draw upon the Social Movement Ecology framework of the Ayni Institute and the distinction between ‘home’ and ‘coalition’ spaces made by civil rights activist Bernice Johnson Reagon. I combine these with an understanding of agroecology transformations to explore the value of working strategically in heterogenous movements to enable diverse transformation pathways towards agroecological food systems.
This research was conducted over a 15 month period and primarily consisted of seasonal interviews with 14 small-scale food producers in Scotland. This paper will examine the manner in which the agricultural practices of these communities offer a glimpse of what an alternative to capitalism might look like. Through an analysis that draws on the work of Erik Olin Wright, David Harvey and John Holloway it will look at strategies that small-scale farmers in Scotland employ and how, in the context of crisis, they have revealed and enabled alternative economic practices.
The research found that the strategies employed by small-scale farming communities in Scotland are transformative in the ways in which they resist and, at times, reverse the reproduction of capitalism through their demand for autonomy and self-subsistence, particularly during crises. Ultimately, these are moments of withdrawal from, and non-participation in, capitalist social relations that are made possible, in the first instance, by access to land. In their entirety they should be thought of as being transformative towards an alternative rather than as an alternative themselves, but they do offer a glimpse of how an alternative might be achieved.
I describe my experience of engaging with the movement as an organiser and researcher, focusing on a recent multi-day river listening walk and workshops I co-organised, which led to the development of a collaborative research agenda and a pilot community water monitoring effort around Rio Tinto’s (500+) exploratory drills in the Jadar valley. This is the first stage of research that aims to co-design grassroots environmental monitoring processes to produce counter-data to institutionalized science that serves corporate interests.
The movement challenges the dominant idea that resource-intensive ‘green’ technologies are clean and just. Rather, as this movement shows, these technologies are not a just transition away from fossil fuels; instead, environmental sensing reimagines and redesigns knowledge production to address widespread water contamination concerns, offering a humble alternative for the role community technology might play in struggles against green extractivism and sustainable futures. Preliminary results take the form of maps that seek to challenge the hierarchy between data coming from water measurements and embodied experiences of pollution. These serve to facilitate campaign action planning and are a work in progress constructed through interviews, workshops and collective analysis of information generated through the research.
A scholar of her time and tradition, Arendt had little room for the ‘passions’ in her political faculties, whereas now, emotions and ‘moral shock’ are often seen as key aspects in the mobilisation and maintenance of social movements. However, based on an ethnography of Palestinian Solidarity Activism (2012-2015), and particularly of Israeli activists in that movement, this paper argues that, alongside anger and dismay, more mundane, everyday feelings of weirdness, wrongness and love are at play, almost unnoticed in the social and subjective lives in those who become activists. In showing how these three almost unfelt feelings underpin and enable, also respectively, thinking, acting and judging, this paper explores both the subtlety of affect in long term protest movements and the utility of Arendt’s theory in understanding recruitment, mobilisation and long term efficacy in social movement practices.
This paper centers on the Swedish context, and aims to explore everyday practices that feminist organisations and activists perform on commercial social media platforms. I focus on the way activists understand and relate to social media platform features, such as sorting algorithms and functionality, possibilities of large reach, and opportunities to speak on trending topics.
To do this, I employ digital ethnography to elicit how feminist organisations and activists recognise commercial social media platforms as tools for feminism. I interview, follow, and analyse content from seven Swedish organisations and activists that perform feminism online, and explore how they draw on, and sometimes resist, technical features of social media platforms. Additionally, I look at affectual dimensions of their work, for instance emotionally draining topics, exposure to hate speech and trolling, and the joy of networking. As affect runs through digital spheres in a multitude of ways, often algorithmically enticed, affective dimensions of digital feminism will have an effect on how networks emerge and are sustained.
As a whole, the paper aims to take seriously the power of platforms as shapers of online political activism, while it centers on the ways in which feminists in turn shape and utilise platform features by way of practices, resistances, and demands.
Although, feminist movements have demonstrated the ability to put the rights of women at the forefront of political agenda, many activists consider that participation in institutional politics does not necessarily mean an option for achieving their goals. It does mean that activists are divided between those who perceive institutional politics as the next step and those who view it as corrupt and/or reformist (Offe, 1989). The process of ‘institutionalisation’, for most of them, implies that movements ‘develop internal organisation, become more moderate, adopt a more institutional repertoire of action and integrate into the system of interest representation’ (Della Porta & Diani, 1999, p. 148).
This work is not focused on the struggles around autonomy versus institutional politics, but rather I propose a theoretical discussion about how the autonomous feminists organisations have developed a resistance culture and a viable political project in Chile, considering the suspicion of co-optation, proposing a self-determination political agenda as an expression of freedom and autonomy, where autonomy does not mean abandoning opposition or other forms of contentious action.
On pivotal days of protest, social movement actors engage in a process which holds the potential to facilitate social change. This change is dependent on numerous factors which need to be in place for movement demands to be met. The strategies employed by each movement were interrogated with a focus on the interaction between political opportunities, mobilising structures, and framing processes in achieving concrete political outcomes.
The theoretical framework is based in political process theory (McAdam, McCarthy & Zald 1996) as set out by social movement scholars, which facilitates an analysis of how these contemporary feminist social movements mobilised in response to acts of VAW, the femicide of a young woman in Argentina, and the treatment of a rape victim by the judicial system in Ireland. The mobilisations that occurred highlighted the State’s inaction in relation to VAW and influenced legislation and policy changes with varying degrees of success in each national context.
This was achieved through in-depth semi-structured interviews with members of each movement, analysis of social media platforms utilised on the day of protest; and content analysis of national, regional and international policy documentation related to VAW. This research gives insight into the different experiences of social movement actors whose aim is to eradicate VAW in the Global South and Global North.
This paper explores unexpected hostilities that I encountered while conducting online ethnographic research into sexual politics and misogyny in the British left. After participating in a Labour Party panel event, I was bombarded with messages from self – described ‘gender critical socialist feminists’ for my views on trans rights. These messages ran a gamut from open threats, to attempts to convince me to rework my PhD research to exclude trans and non-binary people from the analysis on the grounds that this was a more “feminist” project. Such messages raised unexpected ethical, epistemological and ontological challenges, as many came from my participants, or from the demographic from which I was recruiting my participants. I reflect on how I navigated these hostilities, and offer insights into how researchers can work around, and with, hostilities in what we might call the “interrogative” or “low trust” cultures we might encounter in movements (Griffin, 2019).
I argue that the history of groups like RUA illustrates how white radicals can build an anti-racist political future, what I call epistemic solidarity. The three distinguishing features of epistemic solidarity are (1) a suspension of a closed or already constituted self, (2) deferral of one’s judgment to those who experience more pronounced and multifaceted kinds of oppression, and (3) following their decisions when it comes to determining the nature of and undertaking political actions. By engaging critical phenomenology of race literature (e.g., Linda Martín Alcoff, Charles W. Mills, and José Medina) I analyze how RUA used its monthly newspaper to educate its white readers about the political, economic, and social inequalities facing non-white groups from the perspective of the oppressed. I argue that RUA exemplifies a critical white identity using a phenomenological approach to understanding their own racial identity in the past and present, and its potentialities for the future.
This paper makes two contributions to our knowledge on this topic. First, it presents a systematic diagnostic of labor repression in contemporary Latin America. Second, it examines the conditions that shape the forms and levels of repression of labor activists. To achieve these objectives, it resorts to a new dataset covering the characteristics and activities of labor movements in 17 Latin American countries during the 1990-2020 period – a dataset with measures of labor repression, persecution, and intimidation. Then it uses a protest events dataset for Chile – a country where repression is comparatively mild by regional standards – to disentangle the temporal dynamics of labor repression. Quantitative findings are illustrated with narratives on repression episodes.
Following the literature on social movement repression, I hypothesize that repression increases when labor movements are small and organizationally weak and voice more radical demands in the streets. Also, center and right governments should repress more than left ones, but the latter will become more repressive as honeymoon cycles dwindle. Finally, I expect repression to be higher in contexts with strong drug cartels, clashes between guerrilla and paramilitary forces, and full democracies that recently receded into semi-democratic regimes.
More generally, the paper attempts to raise awareness of the risks of social activism for improving people’s lives in regions with formal democracies but a heavy legacy of authoritarianism and violence.
As a result, in this presentation, first I will discuss the psychological oppression perpetrated by the Islamic Republic of Iran’s regime since the beginning of the woman, life, freedom uprising. Then I will discuss the relationship of the Iranian psychology community, or, to put it another way, the Psy-complex, with this uprising and how the psychology community, while sympathising with the uprising of women, life, and freedom, has reformist and at best, subversive, rather than revolutionary, activities. Finally, I will discuss how psychology, in general, relates to the oppression of all people, particularly women, and how a psychologist can go beyond this understanding and contribute to creating a revolutionary situation.
The analysis focuses on the Spanish case. From the wide range of organisations, we select three types: feminist, ecological and socio-communitarian. The selection is justified because the first two had a greater mobilisation and public controversy before the pandemic (massive mobilisations on 8M women strikes and Fridays for the climate in recent years), and the last one because it is the most structured organisations at the local level that have been more visible and have emerged with solidarity actions during this time. Our analysis is contextualised between 2020 and 2022.
We will carry out a methodological triangulation, using quantitative data from an international survey and semi-structured interviews with representatives of 12 of the above-mentioned collectives. Our conclusions problematise the question of whether these impacts (understood in organisational terms, in terms of issues on the agenda, or in terms of new repertoires) have been circumstantial or structural in each type of collective.
For the theoretical foundation of this study, we rely on the contributions of Liebel (2012) and Rodgers (2020) for understanding how children themselves can exercise their citizenship and express their rights, beyond the legal guarantees of the State. We will work with the bias of participation through the construction of a democratic subjectivity in Pleyers (2015). Also, Finco (2015) and Gobbi (2020) to elucidate the relationship between children, social movements and the right to the street and public space.
Our objective is to contribute to the debate on the participation of children in popular manifestations and protests, as well as to contribute to the intersectional perspective from leftist movements.
Trapped in a neoliberal laboratory? Social movements, democracy’s legitimacy, and the current conservative reaction
The study and theorisation of democracy and social movements studies, which have coalesced until recently, pay attention to how social movements become incubators (della Porta, 2020) of laboratories of social change. In 2019, a social revolt accelerated a constitutional moment in Chile that opened up the possibility of dismantling neoliberalism’s first laboratory by replacing Pinochet’s constitution through a fully elected constitutional assembly with gender parity and set quotas for Indigenous people’s delegates. However, not only have Chileans voted overwhelmingly to reject a new progressive constitution last September 2022, but also 62% of Chileans voters rejected the most democratic progressive deliberative space Chile has had. The result of the plebiscite last September 2022 marked a conservative reaction that seeks, by all means, to ensure that the pillars of neoliberalism are not touched, and it echoes the resurgence of far-right populism elsewhere. Long-standing social movements’ struggles against economic insecurities and inequalities have become hegemonic for far-right populist parties. Across Europe, populists – especially those on the ideological right – have been winning larger shares of the vote in recent legislative elections (Silver, 2022) and placing in power climate change sceptics while underscoring the growing electoral strength that far-right populism has displayed in Europe recently.
This panel aims to guide the discussion on how social movements navigate this setback.
- What lessons can activists and social movements draw from the current moment?
- How do social movements/activists reconfigure their strategies after defeat, and how is the question of politics addressed in that process?
- Could this regressive moment offer an invaluable opportunity for political critique and practice orientation within social movements?
Speakers
Cristina Flesher Fominaya (PhD University of California, Berkeley) is Professor of Global Studies at Aarhus University, Denmark, where she heads up the Deminova Lab for democratic innovation and social movements. She is Editor in Chief of the journal Social Movement Studies, and co-founder of the open access social movements journal Interface. Her three most recent books are Democracy Reloaded: Inside Spain’s Political Laboratory from 15-M to Podemos (Oxford University Press 2020); Social Movements in a Globalized World 2nd Edition (Palgrave Macmillan/ Red Globe 2020) and The Routledge Handbook of Contemporary European Social Movements: Protest in Turbulent Times (2020). She has published widely on social movements, politics, and democracy.
Carlos Ruiz Encina (Department of Sociology, Universidad of Chile) is a sociologist and Doctor in Latin America Studies from University of Chile. Professor Associate of Department of Sociology of same university and member of his Laboratorio de Análisis de Coyuntura Social. His research topics are social structure and conflict; class and social actor analysis; the relationship between the state, neoliberalism and development models; and Latin American sociological theory. Some of his latest books are La política en el neoliberalismo. Experiencias latinoamericanas (Lom Ediciones, 2019), Octubre chileno. La irrupción de un nuevo pueblo (Taurus, 2020), and El poder constituyente de la revuelta chilena (CLACSO, 2022) co-authored with Sebastián Caviedes.
Sebastián Caviedes (Department of Sociology, University of Chile) is a sociologist, Master in Latin America Studies and Doctoral candidate in Social Sciences from University of Chile. Professor in the Baccalaureate program at the same university. He is member of Laboratorio de Análisis de Coyuntura Social of Department of Sociology. His research topics are intelectuallity and technocracies under Neoliberalism; State, economic development, and business groups; Social structure, classes, and socio-political conflict. His latest book is El poder constituyente de la revuelta chilena (CLACSO, 2022), co-authored with Carlos Ruiz Encina.
Karla Henríquez is a social psychologist, doctor in American Studies, and researcher at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research on Democracy, Institutions and Subjectivity of the Catholic University of Louvain. Her research interests are activism and youth. Her latest projects are “Grassroots and Institutionalism: opportunities and Challenges in the current democratic tension for the Chilean and Ecuadorian Contexts” (Clacso) and “Memory and Resistance in women actors of Society: mournful lives in Victims of human rights violations” (Wallonie-Bruxelles International). She recently coordinated the books El despertar chileno: revuelta y subjetividad política (2022, Clacso) and Juventud y Pandemia. Reflexiones investigaciones y propuestas (2023, Ariadna).
Juan Pablo Rodríguez is an asistant professor and researcher at the Reaserch Center for Social Sciences and Youth at the Catholic University Silva Henriquez. His research interests include political sociology, social movements and social and political theory. He is the author of Resisting Neoliberal Capitalism in Chile: the possibility of social critique (Palgrave 2020).
Ivette Hernandez Santibanez is an interdisciplinary political sociologist, with a PhD in Sociology from University College London. Ivette is Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Manchester. Before joining the University of Manchester, she taught at King’s College London, UCL Institute of Education (IOE), Polytechnic University of Catalonia, and the Adolfo Ibanez University in Chile.
Ivette’s research lies at the intersection of social movements, urban politics, neoliberalism and inequalities associated with market driven education agendas, and democratic transformations within post-authoritarian societies. She has extensively researched the socio-spatial constitution of the Chilean student movement and its role in collectively organising a larger political strategy to transcend neoliberalism in Chile. She is currently writing her monograph on space and politics in the Chilean student movement.
Wednesday 14th June, 2023
Keywords: Antifascism, Political Protest, Militant violence, European movements.
Nevertheless, there were a few who consciously opposed the SED outside parliament and, at the same time, rejected the national unification mania and a sell-out of the GDR to the Western capital. These included small associations such as the Autonomous Antifa and squatters in Potsdam and East Berlin, parts of the Freie Arbeiterinnen- und Arbeiter-Union (Free Workers’ Union), the Berlin Umweltbibliothek, Kirche von Unten, the Revolutionäre Autonome Jugendverband (Revolutionary Autonomous Youth Association) and the 13. Autonome Gruppe (13th Autonomous Group).
In the paper, I reconstruct radical left positioning and practices of activists and initiatives between system change and utopia, personal fulfilment and political organising. What did the activist want, what were their ideas, and what did they want to achieve? What lessons can be learned from this time? The analysis is based on biographical interviews and historical documents surrounding the social upheaval of 1989/90.
Weiß, P.-U. (2015): Civil Society from the Underground, in Journal of Urban History 41 (2015) 4, pp. 647–664.
Demand among community members for political education and meaningful resistance has been on the rise among those engaged in community organising work in the US and UK, and they are savvy enough to see that depoliticised forms do little to curb rising inequality and right-wing populist regimes globally. Effective organising must do more than invoke Freire and Alinsky in proposals evaluated by state apparatuses that fund technocratic and “entrepreneurial” solutions and ignore grassroots organising entirely.
Using archival materials and interviews with organisers in the UK, our paper will discuss the limits and opportunities of state funding in the US and UK, forms of organising which combine New Left and traditional labor organizing to meet modern demands and connect to social movements, and existing structures through which funding for community organizing can reach experienced grassroots organisers trained in structural and economic critique.
The influence of the international presence has been considered on two levels. The first is via the shaping of political opportunities, and the second via the strategic decisions made by Vetëvendosje and Afghanistan 1400 in response to the international presence in Kosovo and Afghanistan, respectively. Although the international presence of international actors generally increases the political opportunities, this remained low in both cases for some years after the intervention, clearly influencing the choice of tactics. The two entities decided to participate in electoral politics alongside their other activities. Vetëvendosje’s leader is now Prime Minister of Kosovo after the party won 50% of votes in the 2021 election. While Afghanistan 1400 tried to establish a new political entity, the Taliban takeover made this almost impossible. The findings of this research suggest that the international presence played a key role in shaping strategic choices, such as electoral participation, but this often occurred in unexpected and indirect ways.
Keywords: Protest; nonviolence; change; success/failure, democratization/authoritarianism; diversity.
Ethiopia is sometimes referred to as a bastion of freedom for Africa. The antithesis refers to it as a dependent colonial state that subjugated several autonomous peoples, such as the Oromo people, who constitute more than 40% of its current population. Peaceful social uprising and armed conflict has characterized Ethiopian political trajectories that largely spring from its unique history. The Oromo Protest (2014-2018) is not researched as to its expected or unexpected role in initiating a chain of events for democratization or installing authoritarianism.
On 25 April 2014, University students in a town called Ambo, Oromiya Regional State, Ethiopia, conducted a massive gathering on their campus premises. Before lightening up the historic demonstration, they swore they would not indulge in physical violence and underlined their strict adherence to peaceful struggle. Once the battle strategy was laid down, they started to discuss the point they wanted to bring to the attention of the authorities. These points were: First, the so-called Integrated Master Plan of Addis Ababa breaches the rights of the Oromo people since it unnecessarily displaces the Oromo farmers; leads to an uncontrolled expansion of the City into the hinterland of Oromia without the consent of the Oromo; epitomizes the disrespect towards the Oromo people. Second, demand legal retribution for the insults and mistreatment of the Oromo people and the human rights abuses. Third, an urgent response to the widespread corruption in Oromia that has dragged the Oromo people into poverty. By holding this demand up, the University students peacefully marched into the town and came back peacefully to their dormitories. The same action followed the next day in the same fashion.
The popular uprising spread to several cities. High school students and the young joined the course. It continued for the next four years until, in March 2018, it led to the resignation of the then Prime Minster, Hailemariam Desalegn. In April of the same year, the ruling party, Ethiopian People’s Democratic Front, elected a new chairman, Abiy Ahmed, who assumed Premiership by default. The new Prime Minster, Abiy Ahmed, kicked off a peace agreement with Eritrea, released political prisoners, and revoked the draconian oppressive law, referred to as the law on terrorism.
Yet Ethiopia once again plunged into a civil war. The government intensified its attack on the Oromo Liberation Army in Oromiya. In November 2020, the central government declared an all-out war on Tigray Regional State. The Nobel Peace Prize winner became the champion of war. Ethiopia became once again a pariah state. All the promises and some of the positive actions were dramatically reversed. Huge human rights abuses by the government of Nobel Prize Winner and Eritrean forces in Tigray and Oromiya became the order of the day.
No systematic study has yet been conducted on this essential popular movement and its results. Therefore, I would like to ponder: What were the features and processes of the popular uprising led to the change of government in 2018? What is the socio-political function of the uprising that led to the rise of the Nobel Prize Winner Prime Minster and his plunge into the war that recorded incalculable human rights abuses and possibly ethnic cleansing? How and why do the ideals of the popular uprising fail to materialize? Why could the popular movement not rekindle when it was clear that its ideals had not come to fruition? What are the chances of success of the popular uprising/social movements in the context of third-world countries, dictatorial regimes and multiethnic societies such as Ethiopia? was the uprising peaceful as the participant hoped? What factors affect the peacefulness or violence and success of the uprising? What are the practical and theoretical implications of this popular uprising?
By Buli Edjeta Jobir, 2023, buliedjeta@gmail.com
Since the first known strike amongst Deliveroo couriers in 2016, food delivery platforms have emerged as sites of intense labour-capital conflict. Wildcat work stoppages, coordinated strikes and targeted protests have proliferated in the UK, usually in the form of brief outbursts of action amongst non-unionised couriers, which dissipate within days.
The 2021-22 Stuart Delivery dispute interrupted this erratic pattern. Beginning in December 2021, Stuart couriers in Sheffield – organised through the Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain (IWGB) – initiated a campaign of boycotts targeting deliveries from key restaurants, with the aim of exerting secondary pressure on Stuart following an imposed change in couriers’ pay structure. Simultaneously, the couriers and their union sought to generalise collective action across England in order to increase pressure on the company.
Lasting over six months, “the UK’s longest continuous gig-economy strike” saw the deployment of a range of creative tactics – though none of these were ultimately successful, with the dispute quietly coming to an end following a decline in courier participation and a decision by the IWGB to cease efforts at generalisation in June 2022.
Through the lens of strategy, this paper sets out to understand both the longevity of this campaign and the means by which it was conducted more broadly. It identifies the significance of both dramatic moments of strategy-transformation and of continuous, latent processes whereby tactics were applied and tested. In addition, it pays particular attention to the challenges of maintaining a single, unitary strategy amongst diverse constituent actors – including unionised couriers, non-unionised couriers, union officials, and socialist volunteers – which ultimately saw the disintegration of the collective actor and collapse of the campaign.
Our argument is based on 13 months of ethnographic fieldwork with activists campaigning against cuts and privatisation, and ongoing involvement with campaigns against charging migrants for healthcare in the UK. This work revealed the limitations of anchoring campaigns in the iconicity of the NHS. The NHS has been described as a nationalist institution. It benefits from the exploitation of healthcare professionals from former colonies and, simultaneously, governments have used the exclusion of migrants from NHS care to signal to resident populations that the UK is not a “soft touch”. The government thus instrumentalises the NHS in its “hostile environment” policy, parading its focus on the rights of citizens, at the expense of non-citizens.We show how, in response, activists construct moral arguments that owe more to class solidarity than to the concept of citizenship. Activists considered the NHS as an example of “actually existing socialism” and based their moral arguments on references to NHS values: free, comprehensive, and universal. The inclusion of the rights of migrant populations in their campaigns was rooted in this last value – universality. Rather than references to citizenship, which work by drawing boundaries, universality eschews boundaries, instead focusing on shared interests. Consequently, the erosion of migrants’ rights is not an unfortunate inequality to be tackled by charitable citizens. Instead, as universality considers the migrant “one of us”, an attack on migrants becomes an attack on “us”. An implicit coalition is thus formed in which the campaign is not one of advocacy, but of solidarity.
Involving deliberate, calculated efforts to ‘structure the possible field of action of others’ (Foucault, 1982: 790), CWB is a paradigm example of governmentality. However, it has been largely ignored within the governmentality literature. This can be attributed to the almost exclusive focus of governmentality scholarship on liberal and neoliberal forms of governmentality.
However, in recent years, a fledgling ‘left governmentality’ literature has begun to emerge. This paper explores whether theories of left governmentality can help us to understand Community Wealth Building, and to help provide the theory which can underpin its role in a strategy of societal transformation.
References
Milburn, K. and Russell, B.T. (2018) What can an institution do? Towards Public-Common partnerships and a new common-sense. Renewal: A journal of social democracy, 26 (4). pp. 45-55.
Foucault, M. (1982). The Subject and Power. Critical Inquiry, 8(4), 777–795. https://doi.org/10.1086/448181
This paper will critically analyse the discourse produced by State, Judiciary and popular protest in for and against the ban and will show shifting ways the political erupts through the cricial sites of media , state and popular struggles. The popular protest and legal battle after this also revealed the fact that marginal forces in Indian democracy are not merely subjects or victims of the regime but also agents whose resistance both contributes to their own freedom and rights and shapes ideas about freedom and expanding the notion of public.
By citing examples from three social movements that have marked the turn of digital activism in Nigeria in the last decade – #OccupyNigeria, #BringBackOurGirls and #EndSARS – my paper explains Twitter as a public sphere for continued civic and political discourse, even though it has inherent complexities. I define influence as symbolic capital and use it as an entry point to explore social media cultural productions, thereby opening up new ways of understanding contemporary activism, power and participation, and social change. I draw on studies on social movements and digital media, public sphere, civil sphere, and netnography to propose a critical analytical approach to studying digital activism in Nigeria. I contend that such approach is an important step to understanding civil advocacy and contributing unique epistemological insights on the use of social media and citizenship in Africa.
The paper brings together findings from the international MOBILISE Project based on two waves of interviews in Warsaw, Lublin and Gdańsk, with insights from ethnography and visual ethnography conducted mostly in Lodz within the “Beyond NGOs and Protest Movements” project based at ZOiS Berlin.
The paper focuses on two aspects of these anti-squat mobilisations. The first is the characterisation of the repertoires of action and of the political framings of these anti-squat coalitions. In a larger perspective, it is not only the actions of these groups that are to be considered but their interaction (conflicting or not) with the other actors of these social events: squatters, owners of occupied premises, local communities, public authorities, local and national media etc. The examination of these interactions also allows us to think of these events in terms of ‘moral panics’ staged by different media and their consequences in terms of legislative developments: two anti-squatting laws in 2021 and 2023 have been voted by the French Parliament. In methodological terms, this paper is based on two tools. The first is semi-structured interviews with actors of these mobilisations. The second consists in a textual content analysis of press articles related to these events.